Wednesday, 14 February 2007

Article: Loosing the Business Case with PHP4?

The Dotvoid web site has published an article summarizing the benefits of PHP 5 and how PHP4 is loosing the market share in business. This article is a total contrast to Clay Loveless’s post on his blog, ‘Why not PHP 5?’ which talks about the popularity of PHP4 and PHP 5’s failure to gain a position in the market.

The Dotvoid article, agrees that he PHP 5 uptake has been slow. Many Internet service providers as well as many developers are reluctant to switch, it says. The author of the article reasons out that it is probably because of a circular dependency. A large number of open source applications still work only with PHP4 so ISPs are reluctant to upgrade. As ISPs are reluctant to upgrade the popular open source projects are hesitant to upgrade too. But still the author feels PHP 5 is increasing in demand and finally the day will come when version 4 will be considered legacy. He hopes that the changes should happen before the advent of PHP 6.

The author clarifies that PHP 5 is not all about objects, as some developers seem to think. New features in the language itself as well as modern frameworks like Zend Framework written in PHP 5 makes it easier to produce quality software. The author predicts that popular open source applications written in PHP4 will be overrun by new fresh applications that make use of all the new features. These applications are developed faster with better quality. He warns that if the service providers do not upgrade they will not be able to attract new customers. Eventually they will even start loosing customers, he says.

So if open source projects want to stay competitive, he advises the project leaders to switch to PHP 5 before it is too late. The ISPs can also play a good role in planning ahead as the new fresh applications of tomorrow and today won't work on their servers, if they won’t upgrade. So, for new customers, they need to adopt PHP 5 soon, he says.